Fall riff

Summer lasted forever.

And then there was fall. As often happens, when summer ebbs and leaves us contemplating the looming winter, life gets busy.

What have we been up to? We've been busy.

In mid-October I joined fellow members of the Toronto Moto Scooter Club and headed northeast towards Georgian Bay.

This is the ride that marked the arrival of fall.

Requiem for an epoch

My life began as we emerged from horrible decades of genocide, world wars, and depression. The lessons we learned at unimaginable cost gave rise to an era of stability, growth, and prosperity accompanied by unprecedented international cooperation.

Today we stand at the edge of a precipice. A very dangerous time in history.

Canadians are a rare breed

If you are not yourself Canadian, the best way to understand what it means to be Canadian, is to study the ways of a quintessential Canadian.

It's a little like birding. You need to learn the habitat, haunts, and habits of the quintessential Canadian.

Scary story

The most remarkable totally scary thing is happening right before my eyes.

It's one of those massive fog-bound freeway pile ups in slow motion. It's a system with the rules tossed out the window. None of the usual strategies like steering or braking apply to ward off disaster.

Except it's not traffic that has me mesmerized like a King Cobra's afternoon snack.

A place to call...

A place is just a place, until it becomes something more.

It remains only a place until you find meaning there.

Meaning is a peculiar brew of knowledge and feelings. Isn't that the same basic recipe that defines every single one of us? Without that combination of knowledge and emotion, a person is not really a person, and a place is just a speck in the universe.

The stronger the emotions and the deeper the knowledge that bind us to a place, the more meaning we attach to it.

When the tug of emotion is strong, and the place is familiar, our bonds grow, with the most important places eventually looming large, punctuating the landscape of our feelings like so many villages, towns, and cities.

Ultimately, a place becomes home.

It's a simple four-letter word. Yet it means so much.

Leaving home is one of the most important transitions we make.

Leaving our parents' home, finding a home of our own, leaving our own home behind, and eventually finding another. None of this is easy, and it takes time.

It hasn't taken that long, all things considered.

Toronto is beginning to feel like home.

Eureka!!!

Toronto is not Montreal. I suppose that's painfully obvious, and it's a really good thing that that's the way it is. If Toronto were just like Montreal, that would mean be one less place worth visiting, and how sad would that be?

Wouldn't it be great though, if a passionate ex-Montrealer could get some really good Montreal comfort food in Toronto? 

That's how I came to my quest to find Montreal smoked meat in Toronto good enough to justify going out of my way to get it. A wiser more realistic person (not to say a pessimist) probably should have said to themself "if you really want good smoked meat, GO TO MONTREAL!" But I'm not one to give up quite so easily. That's why Susan and I headed to Caplansky's Delicatessen.

Rider profile: Steve Liard

Name: Steve Liard
Find me on Earth: 43.6532° N, 79.3832° W
Find me Online: Aside from this interview and my Toronto Moto Scooter Club profile you'll have to find me on the road
Interview Date: October 10, 2016
Interview Location: Toronto Moto Scooter Club ride to Wasaga Beach

Free lunch, of a sort...

That's the way Ed put it, when he sent me a link to a call for participants in a 'popular Canadian culinary competition'.

They were looking for eaters not cookers, hence the 'free lunch'. I've been training for a chance like this three times a day for more than 60 years. You can imagine how quickly I took the bait.

Scribbled - Vespas hauling stuff

Let's say you ride to the hardware store because, Vespa.

Well actually because you need some stuff to remediate the drippy thing that disposes of condensate from the heat exchanger thing-a-ma-jig on the home comfort system.

And let's say that you decide you need a four or five foot long piece of PVC. You kinda know you chose the Vespa over the SUV, but you feel that you need the PVC pipe, and so, what the hell, you buy it, because, well, Vespa.

Riding home I thought, what if I decided I needed an eight or even ten foot long section of PVC? I would have gone vertical.

You can haul telephone systems too. Oh, and by some accounts, Christmas trees.

Aliens among us!

It was late on a balmy summer evening. I was fifteen years old, hanging out with my friends and neighbors' kids on the street. The day's light was fading fast. Soon it was too dark to continue playing catch.

Someone glanced at the darkened sky "Hey guys, what the heck is that?"

An eyewitness account of Toronto's 2016 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

If you need to raise a significant amount of cash to fund research and treatment, year after year, after year, you have to get creative. It's simply no longer enough to knock on doors and beg.

Getting it done means seizing the public's imagination.

Rockin' the DGR!

If you're wondering why I am so excited about participating in the upcoming 2016 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride, feast your eyes on this. If you want an update on how my fundraising campaign is going click on this:

The 2016 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Ten great videos of past Rides in...

Sydney

A cure for the hots!

A lot has happened in the past week. Let's see...

My sponsors stepped up and increased my total amount raised for the September 25th Distinguished Gentleman's Ride by over $600! You will recall that last week I reported on the minus side of the equation that my Vespa GTS, my steed for the Ride, had sprung a coolant leak. Here's where you find out how that tiresome distraction is working out.

ART waking up the city!

When I say art moves me, it's not just painting, it's also music.

I listen to the radio, like most people, I collect CDs, and I purchase songs and albums in the iTunes store.

As with my collection of museum photos that cycle on our television and computer screens, my music collection streams from our iMac to fill our three-story townhouse. I use a combination of the following tools and systems:

ART and a hot Vespa

Art, in all of its forms, moves me. I believe artists make some of the most important contributions to society. They play a key role, yet they are, for the most part, not compensated enough for their work.

There was a cartoon, most likely Dilbert, or the Far Side. Its punch line was  '... will work for recognition'. Even on that non-monetary scale, artists are often left wanting. The well-deserved recognition that some eventually earn, only comes when they are dead and long gone.

Susan and I are amateur art collectors. We have a modest art budget, and we agonize over the works we purchase, yet we are slowly but surely running out of wall space to display our collection. This considerably raises the stakes and makes any decision to purchase a new piece all the more difficult. In spite of our limitations, we are always on the hunt.